They do not have to serve solely as illustrations or explain a future environment. There are many sources of uncertainty in strategy, and they can occur at different times in the strategy formulation process.
These are the tools that every strategist should embrace. 9 This empiricism is a learned skill as is the use of good trend analysis and scenarios. Good forecasters, including so-called Super Forecasters, are more scrupulous about their personal biases and tend to become more empirical in their assessments to try to avoid a lack of objectivity. With scenarios, the same strategy team may have a better feel for how its biases and preferred solutions create risks in different worlds.Īs noted, good strategy is ultimately an art that employs forecasting, risk management, and the testing of hypotheses. Without scenarios, strategists may pursue bureaucratically favored solutions masked as operative strategies. In particular, in the diagnosis and formulation phases of strategy development, scenarios can sharpen the diagnosis as well as shape options for tradeoffs in strategy options and formulation. Scenarios, properly employed, can help reduce some of the critical influences of uncertainty and friction in strategy formulation.
#Peter schwartz ithaca drivers#
By identifying key trends and drivers along a plausible alternative path, from the present to different futures, scenarios can “help Pentagon leaders avoid the ‘default’ picture by which tomorrow looks very much like today.” 8 Scenario-based analysis facilitates the incorporation of critical drivers and trends that might fundamentally change the future environment in significant ways. 7 Scenarios and multiple futures help policymakers foresee possible inflection points and bring uncertainty into account. This is where scenario-based planning comes into play, to break out of rigid mental frames and open up a discourse among senior leaders about trends, assumptions, and potential shocks.
In reality, the signals were drowned by leaders who turned up the volume on comfortable preferences. In retrospect, after a strategic shock, we prefer to construct a script about how signals and vague omens were lost in the noise. Instead of grasping new contexts or potential circumstances that alter our understanding, we tend to project trends as linear plots. 6 Most international shocks were envisioned by someone, warned about, but resolutely ignored. Yet most surprises, as Peter Schwartz has long noted, do not spring forth from unexpected consequences but rather from group denial. This results in strategic and operational surprise. Large institutions, including the Armed Forces, tend to think about the future in linear and evolutionary steps and make implicit assumptions about the next war as merely an extension of the last. 4 Instead of searching for the unknowable Black Swan, smart planners should stop avoiding inconvenient trends that disturb organizational preferences with new challenges and orphan missions, which some call Pink Flamingos. The challenge is to remain engaged with the past but to unshackle leaders from the worst kind of confirmation bias, which assumes that since the future is unknowable, it will be based on what we now know. History is not irrelevant when exploring the future. 3 To posture an institution for the breadth of challenges for which adaptation may be necessary, we have to open up the aperture to potential futures via scenarios posited to test how inclusive or responsive our plans are.
The goal in prudent defense planning is to avoid optimization for one world, to plan flexibly, adaptively, and inclusively. The key is not to be disabled by the effects of surprise- we should plan with the intent of creating capabilities and consequences that are surprise-tolerant. As Colin Gray once advised the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), any strategy starts with the recognition that its authors will be surprised many times in the future. This is not an advisable approach since our grasp of the future is so tenuous. security strategy to demonstrate the utility and application of effective scenario use.Ī sound strategy process is not, or at least should not be, an exercise in eliminating uncertainty and making smart choices based on a clear-cut prediction. This article examines the use of scenarios to enhance the development of defense strategy and explores three critical uncertainties that will frame a number of potential futures for U.S. Marine provides tactical navigation assistance to pilots in UH-Y Huey helicopter embarked aboard USS Green Bay, during amphibious raid rehearsal as part of Talisman Saber 17, Coral Sea, J(U.S.
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